In my 11 years at the Seattle P-I, I had the great good luck to work with some of the best reporters, photographers, and editors around. I had the good fortune to write about the chefs and restaurateurs who make Seattle such a wonderful place to explore and eat. And, I was lucky enough to share my reporting and my thoughts with you, and to hear your questions and comments and challenges. Together, we saw the heart of a blue-ribbon pie baker, the life of a pig, and the mind of a master forager. We looked into food labels and celebrated birthdays and sent a Claim Jumper entree off for nutritional analysis. You were with me, in spirit, on the podium at the James Beard Awards.
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I’ll be writing more about this when you can actually get your own copy of the book. But, since I’m enjoying the advance copy enough to tell all my friends about it, here’s a heads-up now to look for Hungry Monkey, by Seattle food-writer Matthew Amster-Burton. The book, Amster-Burton’s “quest to raise an adventurous eater,” may be the only time you see Anthony Bourdain, Dorie Greenspan, Neal Pollack, and Paula Wolfert all in complete agreement on a topic. (They like the book. A lot.)
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Don’t worry. I was an early doubter, and I will stipulate up front that Twitter can suck up time, can present itself as a background hum of distracting inanity, and that, in the wrong hands, it blurs the line between social connections and marketing. OK? The 140-character bursts of thought can also come off as terse and oddly abbrvtd.
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You wouldn’t think the guy who came up with “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” would have trouble finding pithy aphorisms, but Michael Pollan is still asking for the public’s help. He wants to hear your rules for eating well, writing in The New York Times that “my premise is that culture has a lot to teach us about how to choose, prepare and eat food, and that this wisdom is worth collecting and preserving before it disappears.” (I remember his talking last year about how many great tips he already was getting.)
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Finalists have been announced for the 2009 International Association of Culinary Professionals awards. I cheered every time I saw an article or a book on the list that I had written about or particularly enjoyed — and there were a bunch.
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